


Beam

by apparitionism



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F, Goddammit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-30
Updated: 2014-10-05
Packaged: 2018-02-19 08:12:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2381153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apparitionism/pseuds/apparitionism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Okay, fine, show: season 5 happened. And not because of whammying. It happened because if we buy these characters as people (which, eh, iffy), then we also have to buy that, being people, they will do stupid, ill-advised things. They will make bad choices and get things very very wrong. But then circumstances could change, and they might get the chance to put those things right again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This piece may not quite work, I fear, but I will tell you (spoilers!) that the coming-soon second half of it is inspired by this [manip](http://crazycat9449.tumblr.com/post/93649389834/flannel-shirt-days-q-out-of-cobies-esquire) by [crazycat](http://crazycat9449.tumblr.com). And [racethewind10](http://racethewind10.tumblr.com) said [something](http://racethewind10.tumblr.com/post/93690785016/crazycat9449-flannel-shirt-days-q-out-of) about that manip, with regard to which all I can say is, you know my fondness for that maxim, “Make them wait.”

_We are friends_ , Myka thinks. _Friends._

That is what she is trying to think about everyone in her life right now. She and Claudia have always been fine; she and Steve are similarly okay. Artie, well, he’s still her boss, but that’s fine too. She and Pete… that’s a little more difficult, but they are better than they were right after they broke up. They could barely be in the same room then; at first there was some spite, some “why would you even, if it was going to turn out that you didn’t really want to,” and then everything was embarrassment and apology. Now Myka is heartened, a bit, by the fact that it hasn’t really been that long, and yet they can almost joke with each other about it. Almost. They are not quite partners again yet—and Artie has muttered over and over again about dynamics and consorting and if he had his way, no one would ever be allowed to speak to each other ever again about anything that wasn’t directly related to artifacts and their warehousing. But they are much closer to being friends. And that is a relief.

There is one thing, though, one thing about which everyone else is very enthusiastic, that cannot be called a relief, at least not for Myka: Helena is back. She had been asking to return for some time, and everyone in charge apparently got together and decided that she, the team, and the rest of the world were all finally ready for that. Artie had been, for once, thrilled to see her, because she could be sent out on retrievals with anyone. Any solution to “the tensions of the present moment,” as he has called the Pete-and-Myka situation, far outweighs any problems of the past. And Helena has seemed eager to fit in, going out of her way to be convivial with everyone. “Flexibility,” Artie sighs now, because he can. “It’s wonderful.”

Helena had taken care to tell both Pete and Myka, “I’m so sorry about your relationship. I have fared poorly in that arena lately myself, so you have my sympathy.”

It was nice of her to say. It was the kind of thing a friend would say. Most of what Helena says, now, is what a friend would say.

So now, about Helena: _We are friends_ , Myka thinks very regularly and rigorously. _Friends._

****

Artie has sent Myka and Helena on two retrievals together so far. The first was in Chicago—the fedora of a gangster from the 1920s causing public officials to become corrupt (“But it’s Chicago,” Claudia had informed them, “so it’s hard to tell exactly who’s been whammied”). They flew to Chicago in the morning, found and bagged the fedora, and flew home late that night. They talked about nothing in particular, other than gangsters and Chicago.

The second was in New Mexico. Someone had stolen, from the White Sands Missile Range Museum, a slide rule used by the scientists in the 1940s to calculate missile trajectories. It was apparently turning things around it into explosive projectiles. Myka and Helena finally discovered the thief perfecting his aim in and amongst the vast expanses of white gypsum dunes in White Sands National Monument. How he had discovered that the slide rule had such power, they didn’t ask; they merely bagged it and turned him over to the police.

They had to stay overnight in Alamogordo. Artie had originally booked them one hotel room; Myka had discreetly changed the reservation. _We are friends_ , she thought. _But not close friends_.

They ate dinner together. They talked about slide rules, and on to calculators and computers. About sand, and on to deserts and beaches. “I like the ocean,” Myka had volunteered. “The beach.”

“I haven’t had much experience with beaches,” Helena said in response. “The ocean, certainly, although mostly to travel on. And now, to travel over. That’s a blessing. Voyages did always take far too long.”

As they were saying goodnight, in the hallway outside their rooms, Myka decided to take a small chance, but certainly one that friendship would allow. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said.

Helena smiled a little and shook her head. “You could have captured that fool alone.”

“You know what I mean. That you’re here, and that we can be… friendly,” Myka said, although that clarification, too, seemed risky.

This time Helena nodded. “I do. And… so am I.”

With Pete, Myka had made one of the biggest mistakes of her life. She did not want to make another. Helena had been gone for so long, and now she was back, and that had to be enough. That they could be friends, after everything that had happened, was a gift. _We are friends_. That had to be enough.

****

A later ping, when it comes, comes recognizably, at least according to Artie.

“It’s a prize,” he says with excitement, “this artifact. Hundreds of years ago, agents tried to snag it, but then they thought it was lost forever. It’s Botticelli’s scallop.”

“Of course,” Helena says. “Venus.”

“Birth of,” Myka says. “Interesting.”

“Somebody Italian made seafood and we care why?” Pete asks.

Steve and Claudia are off chasing something Houdini-related, so they won’t be involved. “All that guy did was create artifacts,” Claudia has complained every time she has Farnsworthed. “It’s like he was getting _paid_.”

Artie decides to send Myka and Helena after the scallop as a reward, of sorts, for knowing what it is. (“It’s a _shell_ ,” Artie tells Pete, “not the actual scallop you eat at Red Lobster.” And Pete says, “Yeah, okay, nothing I ever ate at Red Lobster makes people fall crazy in love. Except I do love their garlic rolls in a kinda crazy way.”) They are dispatched to the site of the ping: Sanibel Island, off the Gulf Coast of Florida. The Gulf’s currents, the configuration of the island’s beaches, the slope of its coastline: all combine such that vast quantities of the ocean’s contents are conveyed and collected there. “They get to go to the _beach_?” Pete had whined.

“They do not get to _go to_ the beach,” Artie told him. “Not like you mean. They will be busy bagging a very important artifact that has a very powerful effect on people’s emotions.”

“Yeah, but after _that_ they get to go to the beach.”

“Only if they can get it bagged in less than three days.”

“Three _days_? They get three _days_ in Florida?”

“Much cheaper airfare if they stay over a Monday,” Artie says.

Myka is listening to this only a little. She is once again surreptitiously changing the hotel reservation to two rooms rather than one. (She is going to go bankrupt eventually, so she will have to bring the matter up with Artie at some point… but he will want an explanation, and she would really rather not be the one to add even more tension to “the tensions of the present moment.”) Besides, Myka knows she will need to focus on the task at hand, and that would be next to impossible if she had to work out how to negotiate living in a ten-foot-by-ten-foot space with Helena for three days. Helena has not done anything to suggest that she would do anything untoward; she is even respecting Myka’s personal space these days. But Myka does not want to put herself in a position to make another mistake. She knows she has more self-control than most people, yet she has lately felt something precarious about her defenses, and she very nearly suggests that Artie send Pete with Helena…. but no, she and Helena are friends.

She decides it will be best to stick to the facts of the case, anyway. “Artie thinks the scallop was traveling the Atlantic this whole time,” she says to Helena on the plane.

“Lost at sea?” Helena muses. “The sea from whence it came?”

“I guess fish can’t use artifacts,” Myka says.

“Or fall in love,” Helena says, and her voice is almost as low as the airplane’s humming engines.

 _We are friends_ , Myka thinks.

****

Myka also thinks, as their plane fights through violent turbulence in order to land—and as the airport closes to further traffic the minute they touch down—that Pete has somehow put a curse on them.

“This state is meant to have sunshine, is it not?” Helena asks. Now they are driving, under lowering, threatening clouds, across a bridge to reach the island. “Is that not in fact part of its nickname?”

“Blame Pete,” Myka says. “I know I am.”

They arrive at the beach where, Artie has assured them, they will find the scallop shell they seek. “All kinds of pinging there,” he said. “And it’s getting quite the reputation as a spot for romance.”

“A beach as a spot for romance,” Helena had said. “Imagine that.”

Artie had given her a look, then said, “Just pack your bags.”

Now, Myka and Helena stand and look out over that beach. It seems to be made entirely— _entirely_ —of shells.

“Allow me to explain to anyone who will listen,” Helena says, “and even to you, my dear Myka, that I refuse to investigate all the seashells in this location.”

“There’s a thing they call the Sanibel stoop. I read about it online.”

“Sounds like an architectural feature. Or is it a posture?”

“Right. The posture where you lean over and look down for shells.”  
  
“No,” Helena says. “I refuse.”

Myka sighs. “Fine. Can you see anybody who seems to be using the thing? If anybody’s actually using it on purpose, that is.”

But beachcombers—fewer than there would be if the sun were out—are picking up shells, putting them down; a few children are throwing them at each other. No one seems to be doing anything remotely artifact-related… and then the wind begins to pick up.

Helena is wearing a short-sleeved shirt made of something silky, and Myka sees her shiver. She feels—and fights—a sudden, intense stab of impulse that says “put your arm around her.”

The crowd thins further. And then the rain comes, with only a brief warning fanfare before dousing them in earnest, and the rest of the tourists head for their cars, hotels, shelters of any kind. Myka and Helena, too, decamp to their car.

“Weather gods,” Helena says. “O weather gods, depositing me here in the middle of a hurricane? Not at all sporting of you. In no way sporting.”

“Depositing _you_ here? I think there are two of us.” Myka is not looking at Helena’s damp shirt. She is consulting her phone about the weather. “And it is not a hurricane. It is not even a tropical storm. It is a tropical depression, so will you please calm down.”

“Calm _down_? I am freezing to death in a driving rain _in Florida_. Something is very wrong with this scenario.”

“We could buy you a sweatshirt,” Myka suggests. She is still not looking. “If you’re that cold. There are tons and tons of souvenir places.”

“If their wares are anything like what we saw at the airport? Thank you, but I would rather turn blue. Besides, I have plenty of _actual_ clothing in my suitcase.”

Now Myka does look, and Helena is so adorably indignant that she can’t help but smile. “Your choice. But you’re right about one thing.”

“ _One_ thing? And what is that?”

“We can’t bag every shell on this beach. Nobody’s even out there anymore anyway. So I say we find our hotel, have dinner, and figure out some kind of strategy.”

Helena sniffs. “For distinguishing, in a supposedly tropical paradise, people who are legitimately in love from those whose ardor has been induced by an artifact? Three days seems quite insufficient.”

Myka thinks that listening to Helena talk about love for three days is going to be _quite_ sufficient.

****

They are finishing their meal in the hotel restaurant when “some kind of strategy” is foist upon them: Artie squawks through the Farnsworth, “The scallop is being used this very minute, practically on top of your signal! It must be right in front of your eyes!”

“Maybe it’s on your plate!” Pete says in the background.

Myka looks around. She does have some sense, some feeling, that something is happening, that if she could just fight her way through this increasing fog of wanting to do nothing more than look at Helena, she’d understand…

Helena touches her on the elbow, and Myka yanks her arm away. “Are you all right?” Helena asks.

“I’m fine,” Myka lies. “What is it?”

“Over there,” Helena says. She points to the middle of the dining room, to a table where a teenage girl and teenage boy are sitting. Between them, propped up against a salt shaker, is a scallop shell. Myka knows that a lot of scallop shells look like the one in the Botticelli painting, so it _could_ be coincidence that this one resembles that so closely… Myka knows also that teenagers in love gaze into each other’s eyes much as this teenage girl and teenage boy are doing, so it could also be coincidence that they are doing so in the presence of a scallop shell…

“Distract them,” Myka says. “I’ll grab it.”

Helena casually rises, walks to the teenagers’ table. “I beg your pardon,” she says, and the accent seems to get their attention, “I found a piece of electronic equipment at Bowman’s Beach earlier today, and I believe I saw you two there as well. Would either of you happen to have lost something?”

Myka zips to the other side of the table and grabs the shell. She and Helena arrive back at their own table at the same time. “They lost nothing today,” Helena reports.

Myka says, “That’s good, because you didn’t find anything.” Under the table, she drops the shell into a static bag.

After a spark or two, the teenage boy is looking around, disoriented. “What just happened?” he asks. “Was I drunk? I didn’t… I didn’t do anything, did I? Liz, you’re okay, right?”

“I’m fine,” the teenage girl says. “You were acting a little… I don’t know, _more_ than usual, but it’s okay.”

And they go back to gazing at each other. Apparently, they didn’t need the scallop at all.

Helena looks at Myka and smiles. “Young love,” she says. “Touching, in its way, although of course also brainless.”

Myka looks away. “Not a lot of brains involved in love. Or what we mistake for it.”

“It’s a bit on the nose,” Helena says.

That makes Myka look up again. “Is it?”

“The artifact, I mean. The birth of Venus… birth of love…”

Myka does not want to talk about love anymore. “Figures it would be a teenage girl who decided to take it home.”

“Better it should be her than it be some…”

“Guy?”

“I was going to say, predator.”

“Teenage girls can be predatory,” Myka says. She is wondering if there is any way she can afford whatever astronomical amount of money it would cost to change their plane tickets so they can leave tomorrow. Assuming the damn depression has moved on by then and the airport can open, because two full days here will be torture, because Myka just knows that she will somehow contrive a way to make that mistake that is looming in front of her, or Helena will just _see_ , but that’s going to happen anyway, although if Myka could somehow put off that day of reckoning for long enough, she is sure she’ll be able to figure out how to get over it, or get around it, so she can avoid playing this whole game from before all over again, because she is not going to let herself think that there is any kind of possibility here—

Helena blurts, “I want to use it.” She slaps her hand over her mouth.

Myka thinks she might not have heard correctly. “You want to use it? You mean the scallop?”

Helena drops her hand. “Yes.”

“What for?”

“What do you mean, what for? For what it does. For its effect.”

“But why? Who do you…” and then the thought hits Myka like a brick to the head, just as it did in Wisconsin, the exact same gutting thought: _it isn’t me; after all this time, after all these catastrophes, we’ve come to this place, and it isn’t even me, and it won’t ever be me_. She had begun to forget that realization, forget the force of it. That forgetting had been… obviously, that had been shortsighted, because she has clearly been letting herself think all those thoughts that she was just thinking she was not going to let herself think anymore.

“You have to ask me who? It’s you, of course. I want to use it on you.” But Helena doesn’t look happy about the idea. She looks frustrated, and Myka has no way of understanding that.

She starts to ask, “Why would you ever—”

“We have two days. I just want… it’s wrong, I know it’s wrong, but I want to use it, and I want to have two days with you. I want two days of you being in love with me, as you once were, just two days, and then I promise, I will neutralize it and we’ll go back to normal. Whatever normal is now, we’ll go back to that. To this. And I know it’s wrong, and I should not be asking, but I _am_ asking, I am _begging_.” Her voice is low and intense, but also almost mournful.

Myka can’t believe what she’s hearing. An artifact? For this? As if Myka isn’t already… “I don’t understand. Why are you asking? Why would you need to?”

“I would never subject you to an artifact’s effects without your permission! Of course I need to ask!” Helena takes one of Myka’s hands in hers.

Myka would chalk her sudden dizziness up to jet lag, or the wildly fluctuating barometer reading, or anything else at all, but this has been going on too long. She is tired of misunderstandings and bad timing and missed connections and simply getting things wrong because neither of them ever says all the words out loud. She needs to start telling Helena the truth. “No,” she says.

She means that word as a prelude, but—of course—Helena takes it as an answer.

“All right,” Helena says quickly. She blinks, shakes her head. She takes her hands away from Myka’s and stands up. “I think I need just a moment. Or several.” And before Myka can say another word, she has darted away from the table, out of the restaurant.

Myka is holding Botticelli’s scallop, which Artie says is legendarily one of the most powerful love artifacts ever created, in a static bag in her lap. She sets the bag on the table and shakes her head at it. “Venus,” she says out loud, “you have a lot to answer for.”

And now she has to find Helena. She has to find Helena and sit her down and say as clearly as she can, “We cannot be friends.” And then she will have to show her, also as clearly as she can, why that is true.

TBC


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See notes on chapter 1 for link to crazycat's quite significant manip, without which... and obviously there would be later complications and difficulties and all that… but sunshine. Sunshine. I am choosing to believe in a certain kind of resolution. I encourage you to believe it with me.

Myka calls Helena’s phone, but she won’t pick up. She goes upstairs and hammers on the door of her room, but unless Helena’s decided she is just not going to talk to Myka at all—and is going to stop moving and breathing entirely as well—she is not there. She is not in the lobby, or in the bar, or in the business center. She is not in the laundry room or the gym.

It takes Myka an hour, but she finally thinks to look outdoors: Helena is perched on the edge of a deck chair, by the pool. She is soaked; her hair is so heavy with wetness that the wind can’t move it.

Myka says, “For someone who gets cold so easily, you certainly do spend a lot of time in the rain.”

“Would you please,” Helena says. She is staring at the pool. It is lit from within, underwater, and in the dark, it is practically fluorescent. The rain makes the surface ripple and jump, and Myka feels her blood begin to do the same thing.

“Would I please what?”

“I don’t know. Go away, I suppose. Go indoors.”

“I will in a minute, because it’s raining and the wind is blowing, and now _I’m_ getting cold. But I think you should come indoors with me, because I think we have some things to talk about.”

“I can’t imagine what.”

“Really? Because I think you’re pretty imaginative. I really think you can imagine. Now get up and come inside with me.”

Helena looks up at her, and Myka has not seen this expression, this stubborn, childish expression, in a very long time. “Fine,” Helena says, and her tone, too, seems borrowed from a very long time ago, a time of far greater intimacy between them.

Myka wonders, for the briefest of flashes, if it could be just that easy: that they will go to one of their rooms, that she will strip Helena out of her wet clothes, that she will kiss that stubborn mouth, that they will fall into bed and remember what love felt like and live happily ever after.

****

It isn’t that easy.

Each goes to her own room: Helena to change clothes, Myka to wait.

At last she hears a knock on the door. Its rhythm sounds rehearsed.

She opens the door to a frowning Helena clad incongruously in a plaid flannel shirt. Myka is almost surprised that she doesn’t have a couple of sweaters on over it, plus a parka. “Maybe you need to start wearing hats,” Myka says.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’d stay warmer. You lose a lot of heat out of the top of your head.”

“If you would just say what you want to say,” Helena says. She is still sulking, but she has not sulked in front of Myka in _years_ , and Myka feels that she could almost cry, from the familiarity, and from something like nostalgia, for a time before all the things that have happened.

“If _you_ would just come in,” Myka tells her. “I am not having this conversation in a hotel hallway.”

“I don’t see why not,” Helena says, but she does at least enter the room and let the door close behind her.

“For one thing, I don’t think the entire hotel needs to know about our… issues.”

“We don’t have any issues. Not anymore. You’ve made very clear what the situation is.”

“No, I have _not_ made it clear.” She almost adds, _and that has been the problem for over four years now_ , but Helena speaks again before she can.

“Myka.” Helena’s demeanor changes. She sighs, and there is even a hint of a smile on her lips. “You have. I know you’ve been avoiding me.”

Myka is bewildered. “No I haven’t.” She shakes her head, goes to sit cross-legged on the bed.

Helena’s smile is wider. “Two hotel rooms? In New Mexico, and now, particularly, here? Artie would never spend so much money on the two of us. I know for a fact he makes every configuration of people other than Pete and women room together.”

“He does? Are you sure?”

“For example, Steve and I spent a lovely night as roommates in a surprisingly luxurious Marriott in Utah. We got on surprisingly well. I quite like him, and he… well, I don’t have the history with him, do I, that I have with the rest of you. And he is so very serene in his aspect.” Helena, now surprisingly serene herself, sits in the armchair across from Myka.

Myka nods. “He is.”

“So _Artie_ would not have separated us. And I know _I_ did not. That leaves only one other suspect.”

“Okay. Guilty.” Myka sighs.

“Hence my conclusion that you have been avoiding me.”

Myka says an internal _oh boy_. Then she starts. “And you thought that meant I didn’t… what? Have feelings for you anymore?”

“No, I thought your sleeping with Pete meant you didn’t have feelings for me anymore.” Then Helena laughs. She actually laughs, and then she laughs again.

This infuriates Myka. “Oh, I’m sorry, but I had pretty much concluded that you wanted to sleep with everyone in the world _except_ me.”

“‘Everyone in the world’? Is the hyperbole really necessary?”

“It might as well have been everyone in the world.” And Myka knows her own tone is sulky now, but she has not had the opportunity before now to say these things. And she has not really understood, until now, how much she wanted to say them.

“Two people!”

Myka bows her head. “Two too many. How can you say that you want to scallop us back to how things were, if you were willing to run off and… I can’t even talk about it. Why did you have to do it?”

Helena looks away. “Can it be beyond your understanding that I was afraid? That I doubted?”

“Doubted what?”

“Myself. You. Because we hadn’t… if you add up the time, if you add up all the time that we had, it was almost no time at all. And what if you…” She stops talking. She shrugs.

Myka sighs. “And you didn’t want to find out. And you couldn’t just ask.”

“I didn’t want to find out,” Helena agrees. “And when have we two ever just asked? And then the timing was wrong. Knowing what I know now, of course, I should have dropped everything and run after you.”

“I don’t think you could have. Then.” Myka wishes she had, of course. But she is enough of a realist to see that it could not have happened.

“I don’t either.” Helena pauses. “So why did _you_ do it.”

And Myka does not really know the answer to this. She is glad that it ended before Helena came back, though, because the idea of Helena actually having seen her in the middle, in the _throes_ , of that mistake? It is almost intolerable. “All right. I was afraid too. It seemed like the only way forward. Forward, as opposed to… well. Waiting.”

“So you stopped waiting. I can understand that. I don’t like it, but I can understand it.”

“I don’t think you have any right to like it or dislike it.”

Helena, haughtily, says, “I’ll like it or dislike it as I please. You can tell me not to voice my feelings; that’s fair. But please do not tell me not to have them in the first place.” Now she pauses. “So I will not voice my feelings about the fact that you are no longer together. But I will ask you: why not?”

This, Myka can answer immediately, because it is easy. “It wasn’t right. I thought it could be, for a minute. I hoped it would be, that I would have finally got it right. It would have been so easy. But then…” This is harder. “Then you started asking about coming back.”

Helena shakes her head: “That can’t be the reason.”

Myka gives an echoing negative shake. “It wasn’t. Itself. But it made me think about the difference, and _keep_ thinking about the difference. And the constant comparisons… not between the two of you. Between how I felt, with him, and how I felt before, with you. It wasn’t right, to constantly want to—and know that I _could_ —feel more.”

“And do you?”

Myka sighs. She feels like she has done little else in this conversation. “Look, I keep proving I don’t have any idea what I’m doing in this arena.”

And in Helena’s voice, there is that depth, that reverberation, as she says, “Just tell me.”

“I don’t know what to tell you. Yes, before, at first, I was head-over-heels in love with you.” She has never said this before, but it has always been so obvious, she thinks. So obvious. “And then you betrayed me. And then, was I, again? I don’t know, but then you betrayed me again, or at least, that’s how it felt. And so am I now? Probably. I mean, you can try whammying me with the scallop, but I’m pretty sure you won’t notice much of a change.”

“But you think I’ll betray you again? Is that it?”

“You’ll betray me, maybe, or it’ll be me who does something this time. _Something_ will happen. And then everything will be awful again. So I was trying to be your friend instead.” Myka wants to cry… she has tried so hard. So hard. And she has failed—also so hard.

“I was trying to be yours.” It is a choke.

Myka shakes her head. “I can’t be your friend.”

“I was willing to keep trying. But then the scallop, and it seemed like an opportunity. I see that it was a terrible idea.”

“Here is the thing.” Myka is pushing now, pushing because she can’t see what else to do. “Do you know when I realized definitively that I can’t be your friend?”

“No.”

Myka laughs at that. “When you first said you wanted to use the scallop, and I thought you wanted to use it on somebody else. The minute I thought you wanted someone, _again_ , and it wasn’t me? That’s not how a friend thinks. Not how a friend could ever think.”

Helena clears her throat. “They wanted to bring me back sooner.”

“Sooner?”

“Than they did. But Mrs. Frederic told me. About you and Pete, and I… disliked the idea. So she kept me busy in the meantime. Until.”

“Wait. In the meantime? Until? You mean she knew we were eventually going to break up?”

“I can’t speak to that. But she did say she felt guilty in some way. That she had said things that might have encouraged you to make such a choice.”

Myka puts a hand to her head. Mrs. Frederic certainly had made her think, but: “It was my mistake. I’m the one who made it. Mrs. Frederic didn’t kiss him.”

“They are both most likely pleased about that.” She smiles, and Myka smiles too.

Myka then asks, “So what are we doing?”

Helena sits back in the chair. She steeples her fingers in front of her face. “The facts of the case are this: one, neither of us can stand even the thought, and certainly the reality, of the other with someone else.”

Myka nods.

“Two, neither of us wants to be the other’s friend.”

“Well, maybe I would want that _also_.”

Helena nods now. “We’ll label that fact two-B.”

“Wouldn’t it be two-A? Because it’s the first thing under fact two.”

“Conceded,” Helena says grandly. “It is so labeled.”

“I have some more facts for you.”

“All right.”

“Fact three: the wind’s blowing. Fact four: it’s raining.”

“Couldn’t we collect those under one weather fact?”

Myka smiles. She has forgotten—or not let herself remember—how much Helena likes to simply _play_. “Collected. New fact four, I’m not a teenage girl.”

“Nor am I.”

“Okay. Four-B, neither are you.”

“No,” Helena says, smiling again, “under the previously established labeling conventions, that’s four-A.”

Myka falls silent.

Helena asks, “What is it?”

Myka can feel a babbling sentence, a deflecting, defensive sentence, gathering, and she tries to explain,  “I was trying to be, I don’t know, dramatic, about the weather and not being a teenager and everything, but this is the point where we have to decide. And I don’t know what to do.”

“Consider fact five,” Helena says.

“What’s fact five?”

“The scallop would change nothing. For either of us.”

“I know.” Myka huffs out the first syllable of a chuckle. “I think I really know that now.”

“Then you must also know fact six.”

“Which is?”

“I want to kiss you. Six-B, far more than that, but starting with that. And six-C: please.”

Myka swallows, but her throat is dry. “That’s not a fact.”

“I know,” Helena says. She doesn’t move.

Part of Myka’s heart tells her to just stay still, to just look at Helena, Helena who is looking at her with love and want and need—because it can only go downhill from here, because it always goes downhill from here. But it is _Helena_ who is looking at her with love and want and need, and she knows she is looking at Helena in exactly the same way. _This was not inevitable_ , the cautious part of her heart says. _You let this happen_.

“I haven’t let it happen yet,” she says out loud.

Helena doesn’t ask what she’s talking about. Helena stands up and walks to the bed. She pushes Myka down, leans over her. “Let it happen now,” she says. And then, again: “Please.”

Myka reaches up and pushes her fingers through Helena’s still-damp hair. “I’ll get it wrong,” she warns.

And Helena smiles. “So will I.”

Myka pulls her down and kisses her, one soft bit of pressure, then lets go.

“But that felt very right,” Helena says, and she’s leaning back down again even as she says it.

Myka has time to whisper only “it did” before it feels very right again.

And then everything feels right, even when it isn’t quite, even when the flannel shirt tangles as she tries to take it off of Helena, even when their teeth keep colliding, even when Myka is embarrassed by, of all things, the plainness of what she herself is wearing, every layer, despite the fact that she has just wrestled with Helena’s faded plaid shirt. A shirt she did not know Helena owned… but _stop thinking_ , she tells herself, _stop thinking_. “Allow me to assure you,” Helena is saying as she kisses her way down Myka’s body, “that I could not possibly care less what you wear. That if you decide you wish to make some different _effort_ in that arena, for my benefit or yours, in the future, I would be delighted, but it is no way compulsory. All that matters is that it can be _removed_. All of it.”

And now Myka would marvel, if she could think at all, which she blessedly can’t anymore, at the way Helena can talk and set her mouth to other purposes at the same time. And that is the night: Myka would marvel, if she could, but she can’t; she can only feel, and love, and love more.

****

Myka wakes to unstormy skies. To bright morning light.

She pulls on underwear that she is fairly certain belongs to her, and she grabs a shirt that she is entirely certain does not belong to her. She opens the door to the room’s balcony and looks out, into the sun.

From behind her, in the room, she hears a rough voice say, “You’re wearing my shirt.”

“Not quite,” Myka says. She has been pulling Helena’s shirt onto her body, but she stops. Now she is very deliberately _not_ pulling Helena’s shirt onto her body. “The sun’s shining,” she says. She looks back at the woman on the bed.

“It is,” Helena agrees.

They stare at each other. If there were going to be regrets, Myka thinks, this would be the time. She is waiting for the pop of strange, for the feeling that what they have done is something they will have to _get beyond_.

It doesn’t come. The moment stretches.

“I don’t remember which fact was the weather one,” she eventually says.

Helena is breathing openmouthed at Myka, and Myka had forgotten that, too, how that in itself could take her own breath away. “I don’t care which fact it was,” Helena says. “Come back to me. Come back here to me right now.”

And this time Helena takes Myka out of the faded plaid shirt. And Myka thinks, when she can think again, that this shirt might be her favorite. Of all the shirts in the world. She says this to Helena, who responds, “I will rend it. So we can only ever wear it in private, me, you, both of us. It’s ours alone now.” And to Myka’s surprise, she does rend it: right down the back, she rips it, then pulls it across her own torso. “Your turn,” she says, breathlessly.

****

Helena continues to refuse to engage in the Sanibel stoop, so they collect no shells—other than, of course, the one they came for—despite the fact that seemingly everyone, in the hotel, at every beach, in every restaurant, wants to explain how wonderful shelling is right after a storm, particularly when it’s spring tide, not neap, and so much more of the beach is exposed when the tide is out. “It just means walking farther to reach the water,” Helena complains. “Over so many _more_ sharp shell edges, no less.”

They do walk, though, along the water (once they reach it); they talk a bit, but not too much. The sun and its shine press down on them, pushing them to feel what they feel and save the effort of words for a time less brilliant.

They eat together, they shower the sand from their bodies together, they turn pink from the sun together, and when they have already been in bed together for some time, Myka realizes, and it is at a moment when she really should be considering what she is going to do to Helena _next_ , she realizes that she has not once today, _not once_ , talked herself into or out of anything. She has not questioned a single impulse, a single action.

****

The morning of their second full day, Artie calls on the Farnsworth. “I tried to change your tickets to today,” he says, “but it would have cost more than the extra night in the hotel, so you’re stuck.”

“That’s a… shame,” Myka says, and she knows she’s said it far too dreamily when she hears, in the background, Claudia’s voice saying “money” and “Steve” and “hand it over, loser.”

Artie turns around. “Why is he giving you money?”

“Because I won it from him.”

“Doing what?”

Helena takes Artie’s inattention as an opportunity to kiss Myka’s ear. Myka admonishes her in a whisper, mostly halfheartedly, “You really shouldn’t do that.”

“We can’t keep it a secret,” Helena argues.

“No, but we can be discreet about it. It would be nicer. To… Pete. I mean, for a while.”

Helena sighs a little, then nods. “I suppose.” She leans over for one more quick kiss, and of course that’s when Artie turns back around.

“Oh no,” he says. “No. No no no no no. You… _consorted?_ ”

Myka says, “Okay, yes. God, yes, we consorted. And we are going to keep on consorting, okay? But we will try to _be discreet about it_. Please tell Claud.”

“She won’t have time to be _in_ discreet about it. Apparently she’ll be spending her winnings from some bet she made with Steve.”

“About?” Helena asks, playfully, and Myka backhands her arm lightly. This play, this _unserious_ , this not needing to worry that it will turn serious, they will need to talk about what it means, what it might mean…

“As God is my witness,” Artie says, “if anyone tries to tell me anything else about anything, I will muzzle them.”

“Good man,” Helena says.

“Thanks, Artie,” Myka says. She closes the Farnsworth. “Poor us. This whole day. These twenty-four hours. What will we do with them?”

****  
What they will do: they will walk on the beach again, more; they will eat Gulf shrimp out of buckets; they will laugh at sights and words that are not remotely funny. Myka will say to Helena, “Is this a honeymoon?” and Helena will answer, “Until we get to have a real one, why not?”

They say “I love you” a great many times. Helena postulates that this is because they have never said it before. Myka says it is because they have never understood that it was really true before, and when Helena tries to dispute that, they fall into a “Fact one, fact one-A, fact two” debate again, but they do not make it past fact four before they are naked and gasping and affirming that no matter why they are saying “I love you,” it is surpassingly true, and that it is all that matters.

They walk on the beach again. They feel that pressure of sun, that compression of purpose. And they say “I love you” once again.

When their time on the island ends, they leave the beach and Florida behind. But not the tide. The tide travels with them, it always has, ebb and flow, neap and spring. They will get things wrong again, Myka is sure. They will get some things wrong. But they will also get some things right. She had begun to doubt that they could get anything right, but two days of right have shown her how wrong she was to doubt.

“What are you thinking?” Helena asks her, when they are on the plane, in the air.

Myka looks through the window, down to the earth. She sees water, sand, green land, all through a cotton-filter of clouds. She looks out, up, at the brightness of the sky. Then she looks at Helena. “The sun’s shining,” she says.

“It is,” Helena agrees.

END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original tumblr tags: if I had my way, they would be locked in a room and not let out until they had worked everything out, but the sun does shine, eventually, always, on these two, I refuse to believe that the story goes any other way, and I think it is our obligation to keep telling how the sun does shine for them


End file.
